Generally, flooring materials using petroleum derivative resins such as polyvinyl chloride (PVC) are widely used in buildings such as houses, apartments, offices, stores, etc.
Such flooring materials are fabricated by extruding or calendaring PVC or the like. However, since raw materials of the flooring materials are obtained from limited oil resources, it is expected that there will arise a difficulty in supply of the raw materials due to depletion of oil resources.
Further, considering increasing interest in environmental issues, PVC-based flooring materials have problems that they are likely to emit environmentally-harmful materials and have harmful effects on the environment upon disposal.
Accordingly, a method of fabricating flooring materials using reproducible resources such as bio-degradable resins, e.g., poly lactic acid, or the like (for example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,354,656 and so on) has been proposed. However, since bio-degradable resin has low thermal resistance and strength, it is difficult to apply a calendaring process thereto, thereby deteriorating production efficiency. In addition, when a flooring material is fabricated using a bio-degradable resin or the like, dimensional stability is reduced due to expansion or contraction caused by environmental factors such as ambient temperature fluctuation. That is, flooring materials made of the bio-degradable resin suffer from dimensional change due to difference in temperature or humidity and thus undergo frequent occurrence of phenomena wherein connection between flooring materials becomes wider due to contraction or the surface of the flooring material rises due to expansion, thereby making it difficult to guarantee continuous and stable use of the flooring materials.